We've Replaced/Redone/Re-released our Node.js course!!!

A New Course! (About Chrome Dev Tools)

New

We published a new Gym Short!

Build Better Websites with Chrome Developer Tools will familiarize you with all aspects of the built-in developer tools within the Chrome browser. Understanding how to use these tools will speed up your development time and help you create bug-free, high-performing pages and web applications.

What are you waiting for?

Another course migrated to GitHub!

Improvement

And yes, it was funny/ironic that the downloadable materials for our user experience course were inaccessible.

We couldn't find any current stats on how many companies blocked Dropbox, but apparently IntraLinks and Harris Interactive did some research a few years ago and found that 49% of the companies in their survey had blocked their users' access to Dropbox.

In the home stretch...

Another dropped Drop Box

Improvement

We've moved the lesson handouts and homework files for our Responsive Web Design course to a GitHub repo.

Thanks to the magic of Jekyll we're able to generate the new links with a lot less pain and suffering than doing it manually. It was still a pain... the course has 12 lessons!

Dropping Dropbox... one course at a time...

Improvement

Dropbox is awesome in concept, but working with it in production has been a less-than-awesome experience. Also... Dropbox is blocked by many enterprise firewalls, which means that a lot of our users can't download the lesson files when they're at work.

Downloads for our more recent courses are already on GitHub, and slowly but surely we're migrating our other static course materials there. We should be fine as long as GitHub is on the firewall whitelists ...

Fixes and Jobs!

New

The Fixes

The typography and responsive layouts of the new(ish) registration and login screens have been glitchy from the start. We definitely solved many of those bugs... but there is always another.

We fixed a link to our privacy policy...

The Jobs

We've always had job listings on our site — and we're rolling out additional functionality that we hope will become a veritable job marketplace!

PS:
For anyone interested in how we build/fix/break the Gymnasium, we broadcast a live stream of our development work almost every Tuesday at 1:30pm Eastern.

Final exam nightmares...

Fix

On May 1, some of our students began reporting issues submitting assessment quizzes and final exams for all courses on Gymnasium. After some investigation, our team determined the cause of the issue, and have released a fix as of this morning.

You should now be able to complete course quizzes and final exams without issue. Sorry for causing any final exam anxiety.

So, what happened?

Warning: If reading about the finer facets of investigating productions bugs makes your eyes water, feel free to skip this part and get back to learning!

If you're interested in the nerdy details, the root of this problem had to do with mathjax shutting down their CDN. Gymnasium is based on an open source platform called Open edX. When rendering an assessment (technical jargon for quizzes or exams), Open edX uses MathJax to process templates for individual problems.

Although Mathjax set up a redirect from their old CDN to the new Cloudflare deployment, it was only temporary, and seems to have expired on May 1. We were under the impression that the temporary redirect would have lasted a bit longer - and had not yet updated our codebase to point to the new Mathjax CDN location. Thus, as students' local browser caches expired, the old CDN location came up, and was unable to be loaded — and bingo! Broken exams.

The fix was decidedly simple — we pushed an update to our codebase with the correct URL for Mathjax's new CDN. The biggest challenge was confirming that the fix did indeed work. So, if for some reason you're experiencing problems, please email us!

Making headway (hah!)

New

You can finally see this change log on the site itself! We're using the very slick Headway App (now you understand the clumsy title of this update). If you're reading this, you probably saw the clever little "toast" notification attached to the link in our footer nav. We'll definitely do some user testing with this — whimsy has no place in IA. Or does it?

We have always been pretty much transparent with our work, and we think that posting our change log right here is part of that whole thing. We are constantly working to make The Gymnasium better, but we don't ever show off how many bugs we push into production on a regular basis. Now you'll know.

To wit: This release also fixes a handful of responsive glitches and some truly random typography bugs. Not to worry — there are several more on our to-do list, and we simlply can't wait to fix them! Actually, that's just ironic; we can wait. We are waiting to fix them.